Introduction

In most market-driven countries that allow for private enterprises and/or commercial activities, the media industry, like all other consumer goods or service industries, has certain business characteristics that drive its operations. In other words, for media companies that do not exist solely by public mandates, a primary goal would be to make money. In its simplest definition, a business model describes what a company plans to do to make money (Ovans, 2015). What is of central importance for media companies to achieve this goal is to attract and retain audiences. If there is no audience, media content is of no commercial value. To attract and retain audiences, media companies need to create value for them at the right time and in the right context.

The global media market is in a challenging, but also exciting time. Constant technological changes fuel competition, fragmentation, and uncertainty. At the same time, there are new opportunities to interact with audiences, cultivate communities, and even source interesting content from audiences. Indeed, the most significant implication of communication technology advances in the last decade is the empowerment of consumers. Today's audiences are no longer passive recipients of content, but empowered media consumers who can co-create value in the new media ecosystem. Therefore, in this time of change, the best way to understand how the media industry is shifting its operations to adapt to the environment is to learn how it plans to make money by creating value for and harvesting the value co-created by its audiences.

This chapter reviews the shifts of business models in the media industry and discusses how media consumer engagement is becoming the fundamental driver of value creation in media companies’ business strategies. The core proposition here is that the consumption of media content can be enhanced by data-based audience intelligence and engagement, thus creating value for both the audience and media (see Figure 1).